Bio:
Dr. Stéphane Bouchard held the Canada Research Chair in Clinical Cyberpsychology for 21 years and teaches cyberpsychology and psychotherapy at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. As a scientist-practitioner, his research is dedicated to both meaningful clinical applications of cyberpsychology and rigorous science in the treatment of anxiety and other mental disorders. Since 1999, his research projects have included developing virtual environments for the treatment of complex anxiety disorders and pathological gambling, conducting randomised control trials on the efficacy of in virtuo exposure for mental disorders (anxiety, addictions, etc.), and conducting experimental studies to understand why virtual reality is an effective treatment tool. Another prolific area of expertise is telepsychotherapy, where he conducts randomised control trials and process studies on the efficacy of delivering cognitive-behavioural therapy via videoconferencing. He is now incorporating discriminative and generative artificial intelligence tools into his work, as well as exploring issues of cyber security and digital trust. He is a dynamic workshop leader and a prolific scholar whose scientific articles have been cited more than 13,000 times. A bibliometric study by Guan et al. (2025) examined the 100 most cited papers on mental health and virtual reality. They included Stéphane Bouchard in both of their short lists of the most influential scientists. He was listed as first author in the list of 15 scientists who published two or more of the most cited papers, and in a similar list based on corresponding authors.